More than one tool for collaborating on writing the Tiki CMS
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00:00
CollaborationismDigital rights managementSoftwareContent management systemCollaborative softwareWikiPresentation of a groupWordKey (cryptography)Product (business)Group actionLatent heatSoftwareCollaborative softwareCanadian Mathematical SocietyComputer animation
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Open sourceInternetworkingHypermediaKey (cryptography)Link (knot theory)Open sourceMereologyInternetworkingMultiplication signInformation technology consultingDemosceneComputer animation
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CodeLine (geometry)State transition systemRevision controlSoftwareContext awarenessMaxima and minimaOpen sourceInternet forumWikiCoefficient of determinationTelecommunicationRevision controlSoftware bugOperator (mathematics)Projective planePoint (geometry)Information technology consultingBitBlogDatabaseWebsiteData structureSoftwareNumberCodeLine (geometry)InformationSystem administratorOrder (biology)HypermediaPhysical systemTraffic reportingControl systemSummierbarkeitUsabilityRight angleGame theoryView (database)Service (economics)Key (cryptography)Term (mathematics)Computer programXML
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Maxima and minimaOpen sourceInternet forumEmailSoftware repositoryElectronic mailing listWeb pageWikiSoftware developerInternet forumEmailElectronic mailing listInformation securityOpen sourceSoftware developerContent (media)WebsiteSoftware maintenanceInformationDigital photographyRevision controlProjective planeTelecommunicationWikiOrder (biology)Differenz <Mathematik>Total S.A.Software bugCodeTerm (mathematics)Formal grammarRippingMultiplication signArithmetic meanForm (programming)Key (cryptography)Computer programGradientService (economics)Right angleNormal (geometry)MathematicsComputer animation
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WikiCodeComputer animation
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Cartesian closed categoryProjective planeMultiplication signComputer animation
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Lattice (order)LoginRoundingLocal GroupCollaborationismMereologyGroup actionView (database)Arithmetic meanSoftwareProjective planeLattice (order)Focus (optics)Key (cryptography)Table (information)WindowRoboticsAssociative propertySet (mathematics)Streaming mediaWebsiteWeightComputer configurationServer (computing)Mixed realityOpen sourceNumberPrisoner's dilemmaSign (mathematics)Interface (computing)Presentation of a groupFlash memoryMultiplication signWeb 2.0Client (computing)BackupTouch typingOpen setCommunications protocolMobile appComputer animation
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DisintegrationCodeWeb pageRoundingMultiplication signSystem administratorEmailWikiGroup action1 (number)PlanningLattice (order)Digital rights managementMessage passingElectronic mailing listSoftware developerPoint (geometry)MathematicsThread (computing)INTEGRALCollaborationismWeb pageTheory of relativityArithmetic meanMiniDiscRule of inferenceDecision theoryFeedbackComputer animation
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Term (mathematics)Point (geometry)MereologyProcess (computing)Multiplication signProjective planeSoftwareWordArithmetic meanSoftware developerInformation technology consultingStrategy gameLimit (category theory)Decision theoryForcing (mathematics)Revision controlComputer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
The next presentation will be with Jean-Marc, which will talk about more than one tool for collaborating on writing the Tiki CMS. Hello everybody. This is not about one specific product, contrary to the others.
00:26
It's about sharing our experience from the Tiki TikiWiki CMS group software community about producing collaborative tools and also collaborating and what we use among ourselves.
00:46
The reason I'm here is because I've been really interested in open source and internet since a very long time. I discovered Tiki and I immediately felt part of the Tiki community.
01:02
Since 2011, I professionally work as a Tiki consultant. So that's not the main topic. There's more here on the link if you're really interested in me. So what does our viewpoint come from?
01:26
The Tiki community I'm talking about produces some open source software, which has over 1 million lines of code. We do major releases every 8 months. Every free release is a long-term support version, which is supported about 5 years.
01:44
The project started nearly 20 years ago by Louis Algerich. He stayed some years and he left the project afterwards. He's not among us anymore.
02:04
It's community-managed open development software. It is not led by any single company. We have a number of us who are consultants managed for hire, but we all have our own customers.
02:28
There's no central point. There's no single company. There's no benevolent dictator. There's not even the initial offer.
02:45
Communication is the only thing that keeps us together. It's really crucial. Without communication, there's just no community. We're very open. The way we work is we're really open. Anyone can contribute.
03:04
That's what version control systems are for, the wiki way of writing software. You want to add it. If it's really bad and causes problems, it can always be rolled back.
03:20
Obviously, I guess everybody knows the sentence, eat your own dog food, which means that you're never going to convince anyone to use your software if you're not using it yourself. The second reason why you have to use it as much as possible is that's how you improve it.
03:41
That's how you see what people do with it when you are among those people. Then we improve it. We add things. We fix it. That's great. The special thing about Tiki is that it's all inbuilt. At least among the community, we never have to argue about which plug-in we're going to use.
04:03
There's not many plug-ins. All the features are there. They're active or they're not active. We can use whatever we like. We use the forums as such in order to communicate as well as forums are for.
04:22
We also have wiki pages and documents, which we use a lot because that's where we have our documentation for users on one site. We have technical documentation on another one. We also have to discuss marketing stuff, which we as an open source company are not really great at, but we try to.
04:48
We share promotional information for making t-shirts or stuff like that. They're all shared and downloadable. All those websites are federated. There's a single login, etc. It works well. People use that.
05:12
As usual, the documentation for users is a bit late usually, but it gets done.
05:20
We have what we call a tracker, which is really a database because it started as a bug tracker and then it expanded. That's where people report bugs and also ask for new features. That really works fine because we can discuss them, we can fix them, we know what remains to be done, etc.
05:49
We also have an article feature that's mostly for communication. When we have a new release, someone gets an article and we share it on social media and all that.
06:02
We have a blog feature, which is rather underused. It's used by the systems administrator's team, the people who manage our infrastructure. There is some kind of a wiki page structure and restricted documents and a restricted blog.
06:26
The blog is there because it's less powerful than articles. All we want about this is to do an operation report. You need a title, you need to say when it was done, and you need to describe what was done
06:41
so that the other systems know what has been done and they can look at how it was done so they can get inspiration and all that. No need for anything more complicated than that. That's why we use the blog for that. We have comments. Comments can be linked to any of the above.
07:02
You might wonder why we need comments when, for example, anyone can edit the wiki pages. By anyone, I didn't mention it yet. Anyone can register, create an account, and contribute. There's no real problem. Sometimes we get spammers this way and we just roll everything back.
07:23
It's a wiki. The comments are for discussing documents. Some stuff like the Wishes Tracker are commented that's obvious. The issue you have with wiki pages is that everybody can contribute on some topic, like a technical topic, etc.
07:44
But people are polite. So they add their opinion. They never remove anything from anyone else. They might prefer to comment rather than change the content because they're not so sure, etc. That's why both are needed.
08:04
It's kind of a way of communication. We've used Tiki to let people provide information about themselves or about who they are in the community or what they look like in a photo when they register.
08:24
Another technical feature, which is of course really important, is that when you have an account you can set watches on what you're interested in so that you get an email when something happens. Because you're not going back every day on the site.
08:44
So that's basically everything Tiki provides for us. I'm not saying it's not working. We use it. We like it. We improve it. But there's more. We also have historic tools.
09:01
We use that because I told you it's nearly 20 years old project. Sourceful was really fashionable at one time, I tell you. Before they got technical and ethical issues. We still have used that for two things. First, the subversion repo, which is being migrated to GitLab.
09:24
But it's still going to stay here because we have those long-term support versions which we promise people that they will get upgrades for five years. So it will switch to being read-only but still available so that people can upgrade their website and get the newest security fixes and bug fixes.
09:49
And they provide mailing lists, which we use actually. So we have a developers mailing list which is very successful. That's basically where we discuss what we want to do, etc.
10:01
It's even the one when we say, okay, I want to start this. And here is the wiki page about it. But still, that's how we get the information. So that works fine. Of course, there's this issue that those mailing lists, people complain that, yeah, but
10:23
if you're not registered on the mailing list, you don't get the information, etc. But we have that feature that we can synchronize it with a forum. I told you about the forum. One of the forums has the same content. It shows up in the forum when you mail, and you can answer in the mailing list and we get it in the forum.
10:44
We get it in the mailing list. We have another one for users. Total failure because people will just ask on the developers mailing list, they get better answers from more knowledgeable people. We have a mailing list which just gives all the comments, everything that changes in the code, and we can review it.
11:07
We have the diff. That works a lot. People actually use it, and they answer there in order to comment and discuss. That shouldn't be this way. That's useful. Historic non-social tools.
11:21
Yeah, we are on IRC, and some of us like that. It works well. We have zero maintenance about that. Only issue three years ago, I think, they had a massive dose. They had trouble, so we use it much less.
11:41
It works better again, but you know. That's how we have frequent debates about what's best. Nothing is best. I mean, the people who go on the forums are not the same people who answer questions on IRC. It just spreads the knowledge.
12:03
Yeah, XMPP also is great. Another thing that's really important is the Tiki Fest. Tiki Fest is when people who don't usually meet meet. Like, you know, there's FOSDEM. Some of us are here.
12:21
Some of us came some days before, and we meet. It's not a technical issue. It's just really important to do that, because once you know the people, you can go back to sending them emails. It's just easier because you know what the person will understand how you communicate.
12:45
It's just simpler. Also, you can ask questions like, why are they in the project? Are they full-time? Are they just curious? It's another non-technical thing to keep in mind.
13:03
Yeah, Tiki Fests are kind of expensive, so we also do online meetings. And it's been mentioned, one of the great things about open source software is don't hesitate to reach to other projects for collaborations.
13:22
They're open. We had a collaboration with BigBlueButton, so that got us integration. You are logged in on the Tiki site for the meetings, and then you click and you get in the BigBlueButton room, and you have your own name. And if you didn't register, it shows guest.
13:41
We do that for monthly roundtable meetings, which started as webinars, but it's not really presentations. One of our very short topics, like, hey, next month there's FOSDEM who's coming. And one of our presentations, anyone has some new things to present to how it's done.
14:04
And new features are usually easier to present on a webinar, because then it's usually someone else who will have to write the user documentation. We are mostly volunteers and that, you know.
14:21
Tiki Admin Group meetings. Oh, I didn't mention that. We have an association, which, as I said, as you may have figured out, the community created the association. The association did not create the community. It's for holding the copyright to the name and dealing with server and stuff.
14:44
So they meet every three months. We really like JitsiMeet also. We've been in contact with them, but there was no real reason for doing any collaboration, because it just works. And for a time, BigBlueButton took a long time before they switched from Flash to HTML5.
15:12
And we were not really happy, and we were really happy to have an alternative. So yeah, now BigBlueButton runs fine.
15:21
And it still is recorded on our servers, which is cool, because JitsiMeet doesn't have that. We could record that, but I think it goes to Google. We obviously don't like that. I mean, I'm happy for them that they have that option. It's clearly the thing to do, but we don't want to use it.
15:41
Other ways of collaborating is that Tiki is part of WikiSwitch, which is a project about providing all the needs of a small company only with open source stuff. So we get in touch with people or other projects, and we get contact with some of those other projects.
16:06
That's how we have that XMPP thing, which competes with IRC, because it is more modern. And we have people we get in touch with, especially about having that open fire server,
16:23
Converse.js, which gives us a web-based interface to the XMPP, which you can get on wikisweet.chat. And Pade is an app which is also browser-based, but it has its own window.
16:47
That gets us, because I think XMPP as a protocol has a lot of things for it. It's federated. It has everything. But the focus, I think, personally, is the clients right now for more use of it.
17:07
The same thing is also part of it, so we use it to spread backups and all that. The message again is, yes, we discovered that even though we provide collaboration tools,
17:26
a good thing is to have a lot of them, and also some we have for historical reasons and we want to change, etc. It's not the same ones as 10 years ago. It changes. So we want to change also. We also have plans. I told you we are not going to stay on Subversion, not even on Sourceforce,
17:45
but that takes time for change management reasons. We want to really improve our mail integration capability. We have SIFT integration, GMAP, in Tiki.
18:02
And in Tiki21, which is the one we just branched yesterday, we have CardDev and CardDev. And as usual, now that we have them, we will improve our way of using them. As a summary, how does it work, generally speaking, for us?
18:25
When we want to know where we want to go and make plans, the things that work great, because at some point you have to make a decision, are the TikiFests. When there's enough of us and the others online, at the end of the decision,
18:41
you can say, OK, we all kind of agree that that's what we do. We have the development mailing list because everybody is on it, basically. So you know what's going on. It's a nice place. And it is recorded. We have all of that.
19:01
Wiki pages are also great when we don't know where we want to go and we want more feedback. The Wish Tracker is also one of those ways where new stuff pops up because people ask for them and we do them, or not. And there are those monthly roundtable meetings.
19:22
The Tag is a Tiki admin group which also gets things for plans. And when we want to discuss how we do things, well, there's a lot of discussion about commits which were done and people just start a thread about that. Or, again, the DevTiki.org Wiki pages just say, OK, how do we do that?
19:46
Which is basically... Did I leave time for questions? Are there any questions?
20:08
In the Tiki community, you have a limited amount of developers of the development workforce. How do you manage to provide new features to the project while still supporting some of the features that you support
20:21
as part of the background compatibility strategy or long-term support strategy? One of the reasons we are really happy with the way Tiki community works is that a lot of us do that as paid consultants. And that means we have our customers.
20:42
Oh, the question was, we have limited development force. How do we spread the work and decide on support old stuff and add new stuff? Part of our job is it's very powerful software.
21:03
It gets really complicated. People like to have a consultant do it for them because they have another work they're good at which they want to focus on. But they have complex needs. So basically, it's often that Tiki does 90% of what they want.
21:24
And one of us, they pay one of us to add 10%. And we will contribute that 10% to the community. So that's how we get the new things. As for maintaining the old things, whoever uses the old things will complain that they are broken on upgrade.
21:44
They also want upgrades because five years is not that long. They come back, they want the new version. They say, thanks for the new stuff, but I like the old one and you just broke it, it seems.
22:00
Or it could be better. And so there's no central point where people decide, you will do this, you will do this. If nobody uses something, then nobody will touch it. And after a while, we say, okay, this is deprecated.